Players' burnout in the spotlight ahead of first major of the year as 28
players withdraw in a week

Laura Robson’s untimely withdrawal from the Hobart International in ­Tasmania on Monday, citing the recurrence of a wrist problem, signalled not an aberration but an alarming wider pattern.

For across six tennis tournaments in the past seven days, no fewer than 28 players have been forced to pull out as the consequence of injury, heightening concerns that too many are being put at risk by a combination of overtraining, excessive dependence on hard courts and an ever-shrinking off-season within the sport’s sprawling global circus.

At 19, Robson is yet to play a ­competitive match under coach Nick Saviano, with whom she combined forces in November, as she struggles to control the wrist pain exacerbated by a total of 21 events in nine months last season. So much for new year vitality, or any notion that the stars would be arriving at the Australian Open this month restored and ­reinvigorated.

At this rate the Australian Open changing rooms will be doubling as an accident and emergency ward as the hamster wheel of the international circuit exacts a grisly toll. Less than a week into 2014, Robson has already joined top-20 players Caroline Wozniacki, Sloane Stephens, Richard Gasquet and John Isner among the legion of walking wounded.

Sometimes tennis is its own worst enemy when its idea of annual downtime, if one is to measure from Novak Djokovic’s ATP World Tour Finals triumph on Nov 11 to the start of the Abu Dhabi exhibition matches on Boxing Day, consists of barely six weeks.

As Australia’s Anastasia Rodionova – one whose 2014 began, perversely, on Dec 29 in the Brisbane qualifiers – waspishly put it: “The more top players complain about how short our preseason is, the shorter it gets. Maybe we should just shut up.”

So far the early-season casualties are accumulating faster than in 2012, when even the famously resilient Roger Federer landed in Australia complaining of a bad back. Coach Alistair McCaw, who has worked with over 60 players including Xavier ­Malisse, lays blame for the latest spate of injuries squarely at the door of the players’ overzealous trainers.

“Players don’t recover from the ­previous seasons’ old injuries,” he says. “After their pre-season load of training, they then have inadequate recovery before playing their first matches in Australia. There is overenthusiastic and poor planning of the programme – too much, too soon.”

McCaw is adamant that numerous players compromise their bodies by embarking upon their pre-season tune-ups as early as the first week of November. He discloses that two top-50 WTA players contacted him with the express desire to hit the practice courts eight weeks before the 2014 campaign was even under way. Thus arises the classic danger of becoming overtrained.

Robson is especially susceptible given that she is coming back from a wrist injury, among the most stubborn of all to treat.

Here it pays to heed the words of Bill Norris, the retired ATP physiotherapist who tended to everybody from Rod Laver to Rafael Nadal across a 40-year career. “One false move can end a player’s career,” he argues. But by the same token, he claims one should not administer the wrap-in-cotton-wool approach, lest the severity of an injury become exaggerated in players’ minds to the detriment of their performance.

Norris’s own career predated the recent proliferation of the tour calendars, where events have sprung up everywhere from Panama to Pattaya City. Even in his day, though, the longevity of former world No 1 Jim Courier was significantly truncated by overtraining, which led to him suffering a dead arm. The increased power of the men’s game in particular has multiplied the pitfalls.

Djokovic, who once pulled out of the 2007 Wimbledon semi-finals with a toe injury, appears to have written the manual on physical resilience throughout his reinvention as tennis’ bionic man, mainly by prioritising agility over raw strength.

John McEnroe discovered the same – that the higher his workload, the greater his flexibility. But McEnroe was unaccustomed to spending so much of his season on hard courts, unlike the elite of 2014, whose pounding workouts on the concrete continue from Melbourne until Miami at the end of March.

The stress placed on the joints by the concrete is well-documented, in the images of Martina Hingis and Jennifer Capriati crumpled in agony at the 2002 Australian Open, and yet it remains the overwhelming surface of preference – even with all the knee ligament damage, ruptured Achilles and ankle sprains that ensue.

Robson, should she recover in time, is poised to be joined by debutant Tara Moore in the Great Britain squad for next month’s Fed Cup tie in Hungary. The British No 4 has been included alongside Heather Watson and Johanna Konta in Judy Murray’s team for the matches, beginning on Feb 4 in Budapest.